Worldwide, cable operators provide basic analog cable services to their customers. With the increasing market pressure from Internet Service Providers and their triple-play offers, cable operators are looking for the best technology solution to provide new broadband services to their customers, and therefore to retain them.

This is especially the case in China, India, South America, Russia and Eastern Europe, where cable operators would like to migrate their television services to all digital services inside their MDUs (Multi Dwelling Units) over coaxial cable infrastructures.

DOCSIS is widely used in North America and Europe. This legacy technology is expensive: network cabling and equipment often need to be upgraded in order to support high speed bi-directional digital communication; furthermore, a very expensive master node called CMTS is required.
This solution was designed for large networks, with a master node connected to thousands of slaves. But the vast majority of cable operators are looking for flexibility in their deployments, so this solution doesn’t make economical sense. Here comes SPiDCOM EoC (Ethernet over Coax) solution called SPiD-EoC to provide Triple-Play services inside MDUs.

To start, SPiD-EoC solution uses a frequency range well below the one used by the cable operator to provide its CATV services, so the existing coaxial cables can be used to provide the new services without the expensive need to upgrade the network in order to stream bi-directional digital communication. SPiD-EoC is based on powerline communication technology which allows a very robust solution even over older lower quality coaxial cables.

SPiD-EoC is low cost, as one low cost master at the basement of the MDU can serve up to 128 apartments, each of them having a low-cost EoC CPE.

SPiD-EoC is based on a Master-Slave architecture with a MAC based on both TDMA and CSMA: TDMA guarantees high performance and QoS, while CSMA enables a plug & play experience. For privacy reasons, apartments must not be able to communicate with each other, so SPiD-EoC software only enables slave to master communication, even if the same coaxial cables connect all the apartments of the MDU between them.

The cable operator can easily manage SPiD-EoC based networks, thanks to remote network capabilities (SNMP, Telnet, FTP, TFTP…). It can easily control the bandwidth allocation for each apartment, limit the MAC addresses allowed to communicate, and optimize the total network bandwidth thanks to a true multicast support.

These main elements, coupled with some others not detailed here, explain why SPiD-EoC is the ideal solution for cable operators wishing to propose new broadband services to MDUs.